“An army of sheep led by a shrewd lion is better than
an army of lions led by a reckless sheep.”

— Attributed to Alexander the Great,
c. 324 BCE, modified

The history of warfare disasters by command blunders in the present day, in the modern era, and as far back as the Roman and Macedonian Empires, too often imparts the painful reality that if supreme leaders of those belligerent nations fail to take heed or ignore lessons from past colossal warfare tragedies, then they are doomed to repeat them; most often at a higher cost of lives, civilian and/or military lives, and worse still accumulate more national debt or bankruptcy. Military history and its political governance is replete with foolish supreme leaders at the top, down to his commanders, and his consulting politicians (cabinet) most of whom are too afraid to speak up.

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In the annals of military warfare since the beginning of recorded history there are multitudes of catastrophes by aggressors, belligerents, and their arrogant supreme commanders. Example after example after example of these tactical, strategic, economic, political blunders can either be observed, comprehended, and applied to warfare or foolishly ignored. Yet, beware, the final butcher’s bill from those monumental tragedies by clumsy, impulsive leadership often led those combatants, their loyal ranks, and back home their civilian population to suffer the losses and drive distrust, low morale, and often lead to ruin. Ignorance and hubris become a graveyard for the incompetent leaders, commanders, political proponents, and in some historical conflicts the fall of a once great nation or empire. Repeating history proves time and time again these cruel lessons to the demise of those foolish enough to ignore it.

For the sake of time this blog-post will concentrate on the modern era, specifically in the early part of World War II in Europe (1940 thru 1943) and how blunder after blunder, disaster after disaster plagued the two supreme leaders of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. While reading, I would like for all of you to find eerily similar (identical?) blunders that happened recently and are happening presently in the U.S. and the world. The similarities are remarkably telling.

Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain

After Hitler’s and Goering’s failed Operation Alderangriff (Eagle Attack) and Operation Sea Lion in 1940 against Great Britain, Adolf Hitler made his second major blunder of the Second World War just after his first one at Dunkirk, off the northern coast of France. There Hitler stopped his Army Group A of tanks and soldiers just a few miles outside of the French town of Dunkirk. This halt was an enormous mistake by Hitler because he allowed the British Expeditionary Force of nearly 340,000 Allied soldiers, who were completely surrounded by the German Wehrmacht pushed literally into the sea, to escape by sea to fight Hitler’s Third Reich another day. This blunder would soon come back to haunt him and inflict losses on his Western Front he could ill afford to recoup.

These two botched operations were the beginning of Hitler’s false idea of himself as a gifted supreme commander. Though Hitler was a veteran of World War I, achieving only the rank of Lance Corporal (Gefreiter), at minimum he had combat experience when he became German Chancellor and later Führer. Many “supreme commanders” around the world have no military or combat experience whatsoever. This puts them in a position of either listening to their expert military commanders, political staff and national GDP economists and heeding their opinions, or ignoring the hard facts and bumble through by trail and error—unfortunately at the cost of valuable, irreplaceable lives and material resources.

Despite Hitler having WW I combat experience, actual reality of wars and battlefields mattered little to Hitler and his self-deluded truth or to his lack of military prowess. Eventually it was a brutal lesson he was forced to accept, but accepted far too late to avoid the total destruction and defeat of his 1,000-year Reich. Making matters worse it came at the unfathomable expense of 7.8-million German soldiers and civilians dead by May 1945.

How did fuck-up after fuck-up chase Hitler after the victories over Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in April and May 1940, just over a mere two months? Why was the defeat by Great Britain in October 1940 the beginning of the end for Hitler?

Hitler versus Stalin – 1942 and 1943

Despite Hitler’s significant blunders and loss to Great Britain in October 1940, his ego and oversized self-esteem as the supreme leader of Nazi Germany he never waned in the following military operations from July 1942 through February 1943. The one operation that would seal the fate of Hitler and Nazi Germany’s hemorrhaging military machine, along with Germany’s resources and GDP to outlast Allied victory was a belief, a hope based on exaggerated reports of hyped propaganda, poor intelligence, actual smaller German production output, and scared subordinates to inform him unequivocally the real condition of his Reich. With each passing month his inner circle of generals, politicians, and economists grew increasingly distrustful (privately) of Hitler’s capabilities to lead. Those that were brave, candid with him were either fired and fired, then replaced by equally scared field marshals, generals, politicians, and economists. Those who showed backbone to him were often executed by firing squad or hung.

While still fighting an ever growing and draining war in Western Europe against the British and its Commonwealth countries, the giant producing United States, along with Free French, Belgian, Polish, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian armies and pilots, as well as the French Resistance, and in Belgium, Holland, Poland, Denmark, and Norway Resistances inside their conquered occupied countries—all of which were immensely strong and very worthy enemies against Nazi Germany—Hitler makes one his most infamous, asinine, doomed decisions for himself and Germany’s entire Second World War campaign: Operation Barbarossa. In fact, most World War II military historians today assert Hitler’s choice to open a second front against the Soviets while still fighting on his Western Front, marked the real incompetence of Hitler and the start of the Third Reich’s collapse.

In June 1941 Hitler’s Axis forces consisted of 3.8-million men, armor, artillery, and planes to attack the Soviet Union that in contrast consisted of 5.5-million men, armor, artillery, and planes defending approximately 3.3-million square kilometers, or 1.3-million square miles from Leningrad to the north, to the outskirts of Moscow in central Russia, to Stalingrad and Krasnodar in the Soviet south. The German Eastern front stretched about 3,000 km (almost 1,900 miles) making supplies and replacements near impossible. The sheer size of the Eastern Front gave the Soviets a better 2-to-1 advantage for Joseph Stalin and the USSR. More over Stalin was seemingly replenishing his losses while Hitler could not. Factor in the Russian winters between December and March, sometimes lingering into April, Hitler drastically overestimated his Wehrmacht’s abilities, their mobility, a smaller German production rate compared to Stalin’s, then Hitler had created a recipe for failure.

Hitler grossly underestimated Soviet production, Soviet resilience, and arrogantly misjudged a realistic time-frame for total victory. On top of those blunders the Russian winters essentially made Stalin’s defense forces two to five times more lethal in comparison to Hitler’s colossal miscalculations. Over a century earlier Napoleon Bonaparte learned the exact same disastrous mistake. Apparently Hitler and his military top brass never learned from Napoleon and Russia’s arctic winters. Why not? Couple that with Nazi Germany’s appointed generals reporting false, exaggerated propaganda back to their temperamental Führer, made Operation Barbarossa doomed before it began. By the start of 1943 with the German Wehrmacht losing Russian land once conquered, Hitler was increasingly angry and only wanted to listen to German victories, not honest reports about the true condition of his failing Eastern campaign and many setbacks.

Meanwhile, though Stalin had absolutely no combat experience as a soldier or general in the field, by January 1942 after rescuing Moscow from the jaws of defeat, Stalin abandoned his earlier war strategy of reckless, aggressive, ruthless bloody attacks, counter-attacks with enormous Russian casualties—often ordering his army to attack without any weapons. Stalin learned quickly that listening to and following much better tactics from his experienced military commanders such as Zhukov and Timoshenko. With win after win Stalin placed greater trust in his expert military commanders rather than what his Nazi counter-part, Adolf Hitler was doing. With Hitler increasingly raged on his generals, firing them and firing them, or expecting them to literally commit suicide by fighting to the death when all was lost. Retreat or surrender was not tolerated by Hitler, ever. He only craved attacking, conquering, and then repeat it all again; no stopping, no retreating.

Consequently, the supreme Nazi leader, perhaps in distraught mania, unstable mental health, and drug addiction, and failing to capture Moscow, Hitler made his next colossal blunder: Battle of Kharkiv, then Operation Fredericus, then Operation Star, and finally Operation General Rumyantsev. If Operation Barbarossa wasn’t a gigantic, wasteful emptying of Nazi’s Third Reich armies and Panzer tank divisions, and urgently needed resupplying and refitting, then the above four operations for the southern regions of the USSR and the envied, rich oil fields, then the tangent campaigns southward Hitler planned would certainly spell the close end of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. And yet again, the German Führer craved more.

Operation Blue and the Battle of Stalingrad

In the summer of 1942 Hitler launched another reckless offensive campaign codenamed Operation Blue. By launching this campaign, despite being turned back outside of Moscow with heavy losses, due to the extremely outstretched Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe supply-lines longer than 1,200 km (or about 746 miles) from the Polish border to Moscow, Adolf Hitler gambled and risked far more than he could pay and replace. How much did Germany lose?

Operation Barbarossa cost the Nazi Wehrmacht and Panzer tank divisions men, whole divisions, mechanized armor/vehicles, munitions, and material for which German industry or military recruitment could never quickly replace, much less the valuable experience lost by so many dead soldiers and pilots. And yet, those horrific facts, those appalling losses, lower morale, didn’t seem to matter to Hitler. Instead, he would push forward with his next hair-brained campaigns: Fall Blau and the Battle for Stalingrad.

The conflict for Stalingrad and Voronezh, Rostov, Kuban, the Caucasus, and southern Russia (Operation Blue) would last for 6-months, 2-weeks, and 2-days along with losses of over 300,000 German soldiers, over 400,000 of the 4th Panzer Army, 900 aircraft destroyed, 1,500 tanks destroyed, 6,000 guns/artillery, and 744 aircraft 1,666 tanks, 1,652 guns captured/lost. To put this catastrophe in another perspective, those are losses Hitler and Nazi Germany could not recoup. Worst still it put German workers, conscripted workers, and the German war industry in an impossible predicament that would not be nor could be reversed despite Adolf Hitler’s continued delusional demands and visions of victory on his people and war-machine.

Furthermore, most all of Hitler’s great Field Marshalls and Generals knew by this point in 1942 and certainly by the end of 1943 that once the Western Allies of Great Britain and the United States along with their supporting cast of nations, would indeed open up a third front against a weakening Nazi Germany. The second front was opened in Sicily then Italy 1943 and moving north to Rome, southern France and Austria. The first front was Hitler’s colossal blunder of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 soon after he started the initial front in the West against France and Britain, who he was fighting for two years plus. These combined four fronts bled and drained Germany’s ability to wage war successfully. In fact, once he attacked Stalin and the USSR Hitler’s annihilation was certain. But right up until May of 1945, living deep underground in his Führerbunker a meager pathetic existence before he committed suicide with his mistress Eva Braun, Hitler believed fervently (psychotically?) the war could still be saved for Nazi Germany with Ghost Divisions and Battalions he was unaware did not exist. Adolf Hitler refused to accept his colossal foolishness as a civil or military leader right up to the second he pulled the trigger of his Walther PPK pistol. He was the ultimate symbol and definition of a Cult Mad Man that directed an estimated 18–20 million human deaths, civilian and military. A quick jump to the present…

How would such a U.S. budget compare to military spending by both partners and potential adversaries today?

How would this level of U.S. spending, if sustained, impact the our federal debt?

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Endless Screw Ups and Ludicrous Obsessions

Not only was Adolf Hitler a horrible, mentally depraved military leader as we’ve learned so far, but he was also a monumental screw-up politically, socially, and economically for the German people from 1938–1946, pre-, during, and post-war posthumously. It would take Germany and its surviving people several more decades to fully recover and while continuing Second World War reparation payments—surprisingly something they are still doing today.

Instead of typing all of Hitler’s many, many enormous mistakes and colossal bad decisions after decision, I will just present below this side-by-side comparison of Hitler’s fuck-ups next to today’s U.S. president Donald J. Trump’s equally dumb fuck-ups.

Strange Controversial “Nation-Partners”

Delusional Obsession with Self Monuments

Unprecedented Resources & Spending for Military Marvels

As Donald Trump has shown for many years, Adolf Hitler was also ruthless. Anything or anyone that gets in Trump’s way meant they/it were worth getting rid of or firing. However, as long as the selected, appointed high officials, the High Command is/was loyal to the death and obeyed everything the Supreme Leader directed, demanded or repeated verbally, they were in favorable graces and awarded lucrative benefits from Hitler/Trump. True democracy? No, far from it. Let me set the stage of these following Hitler-Trump comparisons with a July 2026 speech to reporters by Tom Homan, White House Border czar and law-enforcement officer:

Does the “Nazi Gestapo” shoe fit, not just on I.C.E., but several other Trump appointed agency directors and chiefs in his inner circles of loyalists?

An Appointed Inner Clique of Loyal Sycophants

The Biggest Military Blunders of Them All

As long as Iran feels they cannot trust anything said from Trump and his military hubris—a legitimate concern given his history of falsifying, flipping back-and-forth daily, and what his administration press releases contain and entail day to day as well as his “War Cabinet” states or not states led by Pete Hegseth—this conflict will continue indefinitely along with the soaring costs to average Americans.

What was all this waste for anyway? Was it because Iran was close to having nuclear weapons in 2026? No, that was disproven and debunked several months ago [citation]. And to add insult to injury for the U.S., now Iran will likely maintain control or significant influence via threats over the Strait of Hormuz, a consequence that Trump, his administration, and his “war cabinet” CLEARLY never considered or planned for. The lack of foresight and all that has followed from the reckless folly has been a colossal screw-up that even the idiot numbskull Adolf Hitler would envy. What a pity America that you have been shamed and repeatedly lied to by this current president and his administration. So now the question is upcoming this October-November during the primaries… Will you be gullible again or complacent again for a third or fourth time, and repeat history again?

The Professor’s Convatorium © 2025 by Professor Taboo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0